For Love or Magic

by Lucy March

  “I didn’t fall asleep in your bed and drool on your pillow,” I said as he shut the door behind him. He was carrying what looked like a bag of takeout in one hand, and my small purple suitcase in the other.

  “What a suspiciously specific denial,” he said. “I hope you rested well.”

  “I did. Thanks.”

  He set my suitcase on the floor by the door. “I took the liberty of fetching some of your things while I was at your house. By the way, Liv wanted me to extend her thanks to you for giving them your house for the night. We should be able to move Tobias home tomorrow, but it’s a good idea to jostle him as little as possible tonight.”

  “Aw, it’s nothing,” I said, waving a dismissive hand in the air.

  Desmond was quiet for a moment. “I hope you weren’t alarmed when you woke up alone in the house. I didn’t want to wake you when I had to leave.”

  “You mean you tried, but I was snoring so loud I didn’t hear you?”

  He smiled. “You are uncommonly self-aware.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.” I sat on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island. Despite being sleek and industrial-looking, the stool was fairly comfortable. “You got grub?”

  Desmond put the bag of takeout on the island. “Yes. Burgers and fries. I hope that’s all right with you.”

  “Are you kidding? If they’re bacon burgers, I might have your children.” I reached in and pulled out the Styrofoam containers while Desmond sat down next to me. I opened mine, lifted up the bun, and said, “You know I was just kidding, right?”

  “I think we should name the first girl Eloise,” he said casually.

  I felt a small flush in my cheeks, and my mind raced against the clock, trying to think of a wiseass answer before things got weird. I’m not good under pressure, though, so all I said was, “I like Sam for a boy.”

  Desmond considered it. “Sam’s a good name.”

  We tucked into the food for a while. I was quiet until I got my equilibrium back, and then I said, “So, why all the guilt and brooding? And don’t try to deny it. You’re one long black trench coat away from being freakin’ Rochester on the moors. What’s up with that?”

  Desmond stopped chewing and stared at me for a moment, then swallowed before speaking.

  “I apologize,” he said. “For reasons that surpass understanding, your bluntness continues to surprise me.”

  “I know some of it,” I said. “You were researching potions to give powers to nonmagical people. Stacy said you almost killed her and a couple of other people, and you dosed Leo with a potion that made him forget he loved Stacy. That it?”

  Desmond lowered his head. “Hardly.”

  I popped a fry in my mouth and chewed while I thought. “Look, it sounds bad. I’ll give you that. But you obviously feel bad about it, and from what I can tell, no one died. All’s well that ends well, right? If they hate you, they hate you. You’ve gotta get over it.”

  Desmond was quiet for a while, and when he finally spoke, he kept his eyes low, deliberately not meeting mine.

  “I wanted a nonmagical subject who had gained powers to work with me as proof of my success,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I was ruthless in my attempts to obtain that subject.”

  I took another bite of my burger. “Ruthless … how?”

  He had stopped eating, apparently having lost his appetite. “I withheld the potions that could mediate the effects. I withheld the potion that could reverse them. I risked the lives of many people here.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure what else to say. I’d gathered that much from the clues I’d been given.

  He looked straight ahead, staring into the middle distance, not meeting my eye. “By way of explanation … not excuse, simply explanation … I had been self-administering a potion that dampened my own emotions, my sense of right and wrong, and my empathy, and I was…” He swiped crumbs off the table, his long fingers delicate and steady. “I’m not a good man, Eliot.”

  “So I hear.” I processed all this for a moment, and was surprised by how little his confession truly bothered me. “I don’t know. You’ve been pretty good to me.”

  He finally looked at me, with anger in his expression. “You’re a fool if you think you know me.”

  “You’re a fool if you think anybody knows anybody, and—”

  “People have died because of me.” He said it quietly, but with a force behind the words that made me pause before pushing it further. But of course, eventually I did push it, because I’m me.

  “Who?” I asked. “Someone from this town?”

  He didn’t answer. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard me ask the question. If his jaw muscles weren’t working so furiously in his cheek, I would think he hadn’t.

  “I had a fiancée, once. Alysia. She took her own life, because of the experiments I did. I couldn’t have been more responsible if I’d killed her myself.”

  “And that’s when you started self-administering the no-emotion potion?” I asked, taking a bite of my burger.

  “Are you making light of this?” His eyes were fiery as they landed on me.

  I swallowed my bite before speaking. “I’m sorry. No.”

  He relaxed a bit. “Alysia wasn’t the last to come to harm because of my ambitions. I came here, and the experiment saw some success, but at a cost. I put people in grave danger, all in pursuit of my ambition, and I…” His eyes went dark with self-loathing. “I assaulted her.”

  “Who?”

  “Stacy.”

  I put my burger down. I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t see Desmond hitting anyone, least of all a girl, and I certainly couldn’t see anyone raising a hand to Stacy Easter and living to tell the tale.

  “On two occasions,” Desmond continued off my silence. “I meant to kill her the second time, and the only reason I didn’t was because she managed to stop me.”

  He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and he held perfectly still as though waiting for me to … I don’t know. Step back in horror. Run away, I guess.

  I didn’t move.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He turned on me, his eyes lit with surprise and a hint of anger. “Okay? You think it’s okay that I hit a woman?”

  “No,” I said. “Obviously, it’s not okay—”

  “I took my fist and bashed her in the face, splitting her lip in the process. On yet another occasion, I smashed her into a wall, and she fell to the floor in a slump, unconscious. I wanted to kill her. I intended to kill her. I imagined doing it, with my bare hands, and I took joy in the thought of it.” He looked sick as he spoke, every muscle in his body visibly taut, and I could see within him the violence he was describing. I waited to speak until his breathing evened out again.

  “You’re not that guy anymore.”

  “You can’t excuse that sort of behavior,” he said, looking down at his hands as though they were traitors. “It’s unforgivable.”

  “Bullshit.”

  His head popped up in shock, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at me as though I were insane. “What?”

  “I call bullshit.” I got up and started clearing away the food, partially because I could tell the discussion of his past was turning Desmond’s stomach, but mostly because it gave me something to do. “You were under the influence. People do terrible things when they’re on drugs, and whether it was magic or not, you were on a drug. You’re not now. You’re different now. You’re not that guy. I’d venture to say you never were that guy. Something took over your body for a while, but it’s gone now. Or it would be, if you would let it go.”

  I could see the mental process on his face as he first considered and then rejected my premise. “A person either is or is not capable of things,” he said, his words clipped.

  “Not true.” I pulled two bottled waters out of the fridge and tossed him one, standing across the breakfast bar from him. “Everyone is capable of everything.”

  He remained silent, sulkily staring at the water
bottle in his hand, unwilling to give me an inch.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “Since you stopped ‘self-administering,’ or whatever, have you hit any women? Done anything to hurt anybody?”

  Something between a smile and a grimace graced his lips. “I fail to see how that’s relevant.”

  “So, that’s a no,” I said. “And before … were you all soul-shriveled and evil before the potion? Did you do anything deliberately, knowing it would hurt someone?”

  Desmond said nothing.

  “Another no,” I said. “You did bad things under the influence of a powerful potion you shouldn’t have been messing with in the first place. I’ll admit, you were stupid as all get out, but I don’t think that makes you evil.”

  “It makes me weak,” he said, his voice thick with self-disgust. “That can be worse.”

  “Whatever. Look, I may not know much about this town, but I know bad people, and they don’t feel bad about it. They don’t worry that they’re evil, and they don’t hang out in a town where everyone hates them trying to make things right. Either way, now you’re off the sauce and on the leash and everything’s okay. It’s time to take off the damn hair shirt.”

  There was a long silence. I could tell that nothing I’d said made him feel any better about himself, but to be honest, nothing he’d said made me feel any worse about him. My father had been at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of twenty-eight innocent people in Lott’s Cove, and I loved him fiercely despite all that. Judd was little more than a thief who entertained you while he fleeced you clean, and he had been my world. I knew that goodness wasn’t an absolute in anyone’s soul, no matter how much they played the angel, and I also knew that devils could be the most honorable people in the world if the circumstances were right. Black and white were concepts, not realities, and there was nothing in Desmond’s confession that had convinced me otherwise.

  “Have you ever heard of wild magic?” Desmond asked after a long silence.

  “Wild hmm?” I said.

  He angled his body toward me, watching my face. “Wild magic. It’s magic that you can run through another person, without the aid of potions. It’s rare. There are no well-documented cases of it, but there have been a lot of stories about it over the years. It’s typically linked to people with elemental magic. Earth elementals, actually.”

  I stared at him for a minute, understanding descending upon me. “Wait. You think I have wild magic?”

  He shrugged. “You say your magic ran through you to the others in Lott’s Cove, correct?”

  “But…” I shook my head. “But you said wild magic would be my magic, running through someone else. Their magic was different from mine. It was—”

  “I would guess that your father did something to amplify your magic, use it to jump-start what latent abilities the others had.” He watched me carefully, not taking his eyes off my face. “It also would explain why you survived, and your mother didn’t. Have you ever had an incident where you touched someone, ran your magic through them?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t … think so. I mean, I think I would remember something like that.”

  He nodded and spoke the next bit very carefully. “You know, there is a way to find out.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then picked up the remains of our fast food and started to clear it, mostly for an excuse to move away from him.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  Desmond dashed around the counter, opening up the cabinet under the sink to expose the garbage can. “It’s just a theory. You might not even have wild magic.”

  I stuffed the garbage in the can and turned to look at him. “And what if I do? What if it was wild magic, my wild magic, that killed those people?” My heart started pounding and I was beginning to regret eating that burger.

  “Try not to panic,” Desmond said, moving closer. “When nonmagicals use magic, it exhausts the chemicals in their brain. I have spent years studying exactly this; trust me, I know how it all works. I have potions that can allay and even reverse the effects.”

  I crossed my arms over my stomach and backed away from him. The sun was down, but still. He was freaking me out.

  “Yeah, and what do you know about the effects of this … wild magic? Nothing. You said yourself, all your information is anecdotal. What if I manage somehow to do this, to … whatever, run my magic through you, and your potions don’t work?”

  He shrugged, as though it was no big deal. “Then we have more information.”

  “Then you die.” I walked away from him, and stopped short as my eyes caught on Seamus, asleep on the couch. “Oh, hell. I can’t accidentally…?”

  Desmond shook his head. “Magic doesn’t transfer to animals.”

  I barely had time to sigh in relief before he started in again.

  “But you could transfer it to me. We could get answers—”

  “You could get dead.”

  “It’s a minimal risk, and one I’m willing to take.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not.” I walked across the room, putting the kitchen island between us. “Is it so important to you to make it up to these people—these people who hate you, by the way—that your first thought is to risk your own life?”

  “Can you think of anyone else we can test it on?”

  “No, that’s the point,” I said, feeling breathless and panicked. “Look, I know you’re used to using human trials in your research and everything, but that’s a bad thing. Normal people don’t do that.”

  He shut down almost immediately. His face, which had been animated in his enthusiasm while trying to convince me, turned to stone. He straightened and nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  “Oh, man,” I whined, feeling terrible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “You did mean it,” he said, “and you should.” He raised his eyes to look at mine. “I don’t think this will kill me, but if it does, what has the world lost, really?”

  “Desmond, stop,” I said. “Don’t go all broody on me. I know they love it in the romance novels, but it gets old. Trust me. You can’t live your life feeling guilty all the time. It’ll kill you.”

  “It’s not guilt,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “It’s not guilt,” he said, louder. “It’s shame.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  He spoke carefully, enunciating each syllable. “Guilt is when you feel bad about what you’ve done.” He met my eyes; his own were cold. “Shame is when you feel bad about what you are.”

  “Yeah, and what are you, Desmond? Are you some kind of monster? Is that what you really think?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped past me, heading toward the door that led to the downstairs lab. “There are fresh towels in the bathroom, if you wish to take a shower. I asked Liv to pack some things for you, so please don’t fret that I’ve pawed through your delicates.”

  “I don’t care about that,” I said.

  He didn’t turn to face me, just angled his head over his shoulder as he rested one hand on the doorway. “I do.”

  “All right,” I said, my voice feeling hoarse. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.” He stood where he was, in the doorway, not leaving, but not looking at me, either. “If you’d like Seamus to sleep in the bed with you, I have no objection.”

  “I can take the couch,” I said. “You don’t have to give up your bed.”

  Desmond cleared his throat. “It’s okay. I won’t be sleeping much tonight. Tobias will need more of that potion to get him through the next few days.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  Desmond finally met my eye again, and his expression softened a bit. “You didn’t. Good night, Eliot.”

  “Good night, Desmond.”

  He disappeared downstairs, and I watched the empty space where he’d been standing for a while before picking up my purple suitcase, walking ove
r to Seamus, and dragging him upstairs to the loft.

  *

  When consciousness began to dawn the next morning and I realized I was lying in bed next to a warm body, I snuggled closer, my hazy brain thinking for some reason that it was Desmond. But then Seamus huffed at me and licked my arm, and I said, “Eww! Gross!” and wiped it on his fur.

  “Ugh.” I rolled over and got out of bed. I washed my hands and finger-brushed my teeth in Desmond’s bathroom, got changed into fresh clothes from my suitcase, and when Seamus and I finally toddled down the steps from the loft, Desmond was fixing coffee in the kitchen.

  “I’d offer to wash your bedding, but I don’t have any laundry at my house, and it’s kind of an awkward thing to do anyway, so let’s just pretend a big dog didn’t spend the night drooling all over everything.” I picked up the cup of coffee Desmond set in front of me and took a sip. “Mmmmmm.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Desmond said. “We can also pretend that all the drooling came from the dog if you’d like.”

  “Oh, I’d like that very much.”

  “Yes,” he said dryly. “I thought you would.”

  Desmond grabbed a bowl from the cabinet and put it on the floor, then filled it from a red bag of Iam’s dog food I’d gotten a few days earlier. He must have brought it over from my house the night before.

  “I don’t get it,” I said as Desmond walked over to where Seamus was staring out the window. “He doesn’t respond to anything, even the sound of the kibble hitting the bowl. I mean, what kind of weird-ass dog doesn’t come running for food?”

  “A deaf one,” Desmond said simply. He put one hand lightly on Seamus’s shoulder and Seamus looked up, seeming surprised by Desmond’s sudden appearance. Desmond held his hand in Seamus’s line of sight and pointed to the bowl of kibble. Seamus ran right to it while I watched.